Policy Matters Ohio: Ohio Budget Approach Has Not Worked

The February 11, 2017 Policy Matters Ohio research report, by Zack Schiller, pinpoints why multitudes of school district students are deprived of a high quality education.

State officials in Ohio seem more comfortable tolerating the school-to-prison and school-to-welfare pipelines than biting the bullet to appropriately fund a constitutional system of common schools. All the political rhetoric about career and college readiness is noisome twaddle without the provision of adequate resources directed to all school districts.

Policy Matters asked the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy to analyze Kasich’s latest tax proposal. This is what they found:

• The middle fifth of income earners, who made between $36,000 and $56,000 last year, would see an average increase of $44.

• The poorest fifth of Ohioans, who made less than $21,000, would see an increase averaging $64.

• The top 1 percent, who made more than $457,000, would get an average annual tax cut of $2,412.

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William L. Phillis, Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding

The “trickle-down” economics the GOP has been peddling since the Reagan era have universally failed wherever they have been implemented. We look to Kansas under Sam Brownback; Louisiana under Bobby Jindal; Texas and later, the American economy, under George W. Bush…all of these state economies cratered under the weight of “trickle-down” economics. And we are beginning to see the effects of these policies as more and more safety net programs see their budgets gutted to fund the costs of these tax cuts; we see fees for basic services at the county and municipal level steadily rising; spending on critical infrastructure dwindling; and our schools gutted.
While it is unlikely that our GOP dominated state government will see the failure of what George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics”, if they don’t, Ohio’s economy will soon be a smoking hole in the ground.